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Install WordPress Using WP-CLI on CentOS 7

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WordPress is well-known for its rich content management feature set, ease of use, and quick installation time. The WordPress command line interface (WP-CLI) provides useful commands and utilities to install, configure, and manage a WordPress site. This guide walks you through some common tasks you can complete using the WP-CLI.

In this Guide:

This tutorial covers how to complete the following tasks:

Prerequisites

Before moving ahead, make sure you have completed the following steps.

  1. If you have not already done so, create a Linode account and Compute Instance. See our Getting Started with Linode and Creating a Compute Instance guides.

  2. Follow our Setting Up and Securing a Compute Instance guide to update your system. You may also wish to set the timezone, configure your hostname, create a limited user account, and harden SSH access.

    Note
    This guide is written for a non-root user. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, you can check our Users and Groups guide.

  3. If you’d like to use your own Domain Name to host your WordPress installation, ensure that your domain name is pre-configured to point to your Linode’s IP address.

  4. Follow the Install a LAMP Stack on CentOS 7 guide. Skip the steps in the Configure Apache Virtual Hosts File, the Create a MariaDB Database, and the Optional: Test and Troubleshoot the LAMP Stack section. Those steps will be covered later on in this guide.

    Note

    When following the steps to install PHP in the Install a LAMP Stack on CentOS 7 guide, you will need to issue the command included below to install the required PHP packages. The command in the linked guide does not currently work with CentOS 7.

    sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

Install WP-CLI

  1. WP-CLI is available as a PHP Archive file (.phar). You can download it using either wget or curl commands:

    curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

    Or

    wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

  2. You need to make this .phar file executable and move it to /usr/local/bin so that it can be run directly:

    chmod +x wp-cli.phar
sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

  3. Check if it is installed properly:

    wp --info

    You should see a similar output to the one displayed below, which means you can proceed:

    OS:	Linux 4.15.0-50-generic #54-Ubuntu SMP Mon May 6 18:46:08 UTC 2019 x86_64
Shell:	/bin/bash
PHP binary:	/usr/bin/php7.2
PHP version:	7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.2
php.ini used:	/etc/php/7.2/cli/php.ini
WP-CLI root dir:	phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli
WP-CLI vendor dir:	phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor
WP_CLI phar path:	/home/lsalazar
WP-CLI packages dir:
WP-CLI global config:
WP-CLI project config:
WP-CLI version:	2.4.0

    You can use the above three steps for upgrading WP-CLI as well.

Activate Bash Completion

The bash completion feature of WP-CLI allows you to see all its available commands on the fly when pressing Tab. WP-CLI supports tab completion for Bash and Zsh.

  1. Install the wget package:

     sudo yum install wget

  2. Download the bash script in your home directory:

    cd ~
wget https://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli/raw/master/utils/wp-completion.bash

  3. Edit your shell’s configuration file so that wp-completion is loaded by the shell every time you open a new shell session:

    Bash

    • Open the .bashrc file and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

      File: ~/.bashrc
      1

      source /home/$USER/wp-completion.bash

    • Run the following command to reload the bash profile:

        source ~/.bashrc

    Zsh

    • Open the .zshrcfile and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

      File: ~/.zshrc
      1
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      autoload bashcompinit
bashcompinit
source /home/$USER/wp-completion.bash

    • Run the following command to reload the Zsh profile:

        source ~/.zshrc

  4. Shell completion is now enabled. To test it, type wp theme (include the trailing space) Without Hitting Enter and press Tab twice. You will see the list of available commands with wp theme again on the prompt.

Basics of WP-CLI

In this section, you will learn some basics of how WP-CLI works. This will help you when using the tool in the upcoming sections of the guide.

  • So far, we have seen WP-CLI accessed through the main command, wp. You can follow the main command with nested subcommands. For example, WP-CLI includes a command to download WordPress:

    Note
    Do not issue the example wp command. You will install WordPress in the Download and Configure WordPress section of the guide.
      wp core download

    In the example, wp is the main command while core and download are its nested subcommands. Nesting subcommands can extend one or two levels.

  • WP-CLI also comes with a detailed help section, which displays all the commands you might need. To access help enter the following command:

      wp help

    The output should resemble:

    wp

DESCRIPTION

Manage WordPress through the command-line.

SYNOPSIS

wp <command>

SUBCOMMANDS

cache               Manage the object cache.
cap                 Manage user capabilities.
cli                 Get information about WP-CLI itself.
comment             Manage comments.
core                Download, install, update and otherwise manage WordPress proper.
cron                Manage WP-Cron events and schedules.
db                  Perform basic database operations.
eval                Execute arbitrary PHP code after loading WordPress.
eval-file           Load and execute a PHP file after loading WordPress.
:
    • : is a prompt that, with subcommands, can help you navigate through this help menu.
    • Up and down arrow keys will let you scroll through the entire help command list.
    • Typing q will exit the help menu.
    • For additional details on how to further navigate through the complete help section, you can always type h at the above prompt.
    • You can use the enabled bash completion to demonstrate WP-CLI’s readily available command list. Simply type wp and press tab twice. You will see the list of available commands. Now, type wp core and press tab twice. You will see a list of commands that can be used with core. This double tabbing after a command can be repeated for any primary or subcommand.

Install WordPress

In this section, you will complete the prerequisite configuration steps needed to install WordPress. Then, you will install WordPress using the WP-CLI.

Prepare the WordPress Database

  1. Log in to the MariaDB command line as the database’s root user:

    sudo mysql -u root
    Note

    If you set up a password for MySQL, you would log in with the -p flag as well:

    sudo mysql -u root -p

  2. Create the WordPress database:

    1

    CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

  3. Create a database user and grant them privileges for the newly created wordpress database, replacing wpuser and password with the username and password you wish to use:

    1
2
3

    CREATE USER 'wpuser' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

  4. Type quit to exit the MariaDB command line.

  5. Install the policycoreutils-python package to manage SELinux and open your MySQL port:

     sudo yum install policycoreutils-python

  6. Configure SELinux to enable MariaDB’s use of port 3306:

     sudo semanage port -a -t mysqld_port_t -p tcp 3306
    Note
    Use netstat to confirm the port used by MariaDB with the command netstat -tln. The port in use will typically be 3306.

  7. Configure SELinux to allow your Apache web server to make database connections:

     sudo setsebool httpd_can_network_connect_db 1

Upgrade to PHP Version 5.6

The latest version of WordPress (5.3.2 at the time of writing this guide) requires at least PHP version 5.6.20. This section includes steps to upgrade your CentOS 7 Linode’s PHP version, if needed.

  1. Check the version of PHP that you are currently running. If you see a version lower than 5.6.20, then proceed with the next steps:

     php --version

  2. Install and enable EPEL and Remi repositories on your system:

     sudo yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
 sudo yum install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm

  3. Install the yum-utils package which includes utilities which you’ll need to complete your PHP version upgrade:

     sudo yum install yum-utils

  4. Activate the PHP 5.6 Remi repository using the yum-config-manager utility:

     sudo yum-config-manager --enable remi-php56

  5. Install PHP version 5.6:

     sudo yum install php php-mcrypt php-cli php-gd php-curl php-mysql php-ldap php-zip php-fileinfo

    You should now have a version of PHP that will be compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

Download and Configure WordPress

  1. Create your WordPress site’s document root. Replace example.com with your site’s name:

     sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. Move to the Apache example.com directory:

    cd /var/www/html/example.com

  3. Change the ownership of the public_html directory. Apache comes with its own apache user and group. As a recommended practice, you should change the ownership of your installation directory to apache:

     sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/example.com/public_html
 sudo chmod g+w /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  4. Add your limited user account to the apache group:

     sudo usermod -a -G apache user
    Note

    You may need to log out of your SSH session and log back in for the user group change to take effect. To verify issue the following command. You should see the apache group returned as one of the groups.

    groups

    user wheel apache

  5. Change the user and group ownership of the /var/www directory. This will allow the apache user to write to the directory when caching downloaded files to the /var/www/.wp-cli/cache directory:

     sudo chown apache:apache /var/www

  6. Download the WordPress files.

    cd  /var/www/html/example.com/public_html/
wp core download

  7. Create a wp-config.php file. Replace wpuser and password with your WordPress database user and password. Also, replace example_hostname with your Linode’s hostname. dbprefix is entirely optional and can be omitted unless you need to change their default values.

    wp core config --dbname='wordpress' --dbuser='wpuser' --dbpass='password' --dbhost='example_hostname' --dbprefix='wp_'

  8. Run the installation. Replace adminuser with the username you’d like to login to WordPress, and replace password with a unique password. Replace example.com with your domain, or replace it with your IP address if you haven’t set up a domain yet.

    wp core install --url='http://example.com' --title='Blog Title' --admin_user='adminuser' --admin_password='password' --admin_email='email@domain.com'

Configure Apache Virtual Hosts File

You will need to configure Apache so that you can access your WordPress site from a browser.

  1. Create directories for your WordPress site’s Apache error and access logs:

     sudo mkdir /var/log/httpd/example.com/

  2. Create directories for Apache’s virtual hosts file:

     sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-available /etc/httpd/sites-enabled

  3. Create your WordPress site’s Apache error and access log files:

     sudo touch /var/log/httpd/example.com/access.log
 sudo touch /var/log/httpd/example.com/error.log

  4. Edit Apache’s configuration file to let it know to look for virtual host files in the /etc/httpd/sites-enabled directory. Add the example line to the bottom of your httpd.conf file:

    File: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
    1
2

    IncludeOptional sites-enabled/*.conf

  5. Navigate to your /var/www/html/example.com directory if you are not already there:

     cd /var/www/html/example.com

  6. Create the virtual host file for your website. Replace the example.com in example.com.conf with your domain name:

     sudo nano /etc/httpd/sites-available/example.com.conf

  7. Create a configuration for your virtual host. Copy the basic settings in the example below and paste them into the virtual host file you just created. Replace all instances of example.com with your domain name:

    File: /etc/httpd/sites-availabe/example.com.conf
     1
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14
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    <Directory /var/www/html/>
    Require all granted
</Directory>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example.com/public_html
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/example.com/error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/example.com/access.log combined
    <files xmlrpc.php>
      order allow,deny
      deny from all
    </files>
</VirtualHost>

  8. Save the changes to the virtual host configuration file by pressing CTRL+X and then pressing Y. Press ENTER to confirm.

  9. Create a symbolic link from your virtual hosts file in the sites-available directory to the sites-enabled directory. Replace example.com.conf with the name of your own virtual hosts file.

     sudo ln -s /etc/httpd/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/example.com.conf

  10. Reload to apply your new configuration:

    sudo systemctl reload httpd
    Note
    For more details on configuring your Apache virtual hosts file, see Apache’s official documentation.

  11. Visit http://example.com/wp-admin (or http://<Linode IP address>/wp-admin if you haven’t set up a domain) and verify that you can log in with the WordPress user you created in the Download and Configure WordPress section of the guide.

Common Commands

Install Plugins

This section covers common WP-CLI commands related to installing and updating WordPress plugins. As an example, this section will use the Yoast SEO plugin.

To install a plugin, your first step will be to find the plugin slug. In this case, the slug is the last part of a permalink URL which describes the plugin. If a plugin is available at http://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-dir/, then plugin-dir is the slug of the plugin. You install the plugin under the same directory on your WordPress site at http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/plugin-dir/. Since this slug is unique to every plugin, you can search for the slug of any plugin using WP-CLI and then install it.

  1. Navigate to your WordPress site’s root directory. Replace example.com with your own site’s root directory:

     cd /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. Search for the plugin you would like to install:

     wp plugin search yoast

    You will get an output similar to this.

    Success: Showing 10 of 574 plugins.
+---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------+--------+
| name                                              | slug                               | rating |
+---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------+--------+
| Yoast SEO                                         | wordpress-seo                      | 98     |
| Yoast SEO: Search Index Purge                     | yoast-seo-search-index-purge       | 68     |
| ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO                | acf-content-analysis-for-yoast-seo | 90     |
| Glue for Yoast SEO &amp; AMP                      | glue-for-yoast-seo-amp             | 88     |
| Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights | google-analytics-for-wordpress     | 78     |
| Import Settings into WordPress SEO by Yoast       | yoast-seo-settings-xml-csv-import  | 100    |
| Remove Yoast SEO Comments                         | remove-yoast-seo-comments          | 92     |
| Surbma &#8211; Yoast SEO Breadcrumb Shortcode     | surbma-yoast-breadcrumb-shortcode  | 84     |
| LiteSpeed Cache                                   | litespeed-cache                    | 98     |
| WPGlobus &#8211; Multilingual Everything!         | wpglobus                           | 92     |
+---------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------+--------+

    You can see more than 10 plugins per page by modifying the command:

     wp plugin search yoast --per-page=20

  3. Now that you know the slug of the plugin, you want to install (wordpress-seo) by appending it to your command, and activate it:

     wp plugin install wordpress-seo
 wp plugin activate wordpress-seo

Update Plugins

To update any plugin on your WordPress site:

  1. Navigate to your WordPress site’s root directory. Replace example.com with your own site’s root directory.

     cd /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. Issue the plugin update command followed by the name of the plugin:

     wp plugin update wordpress-seo

    Or, to update all plugins issue the following command:

     wp plugin update --all

  3. To list all the installed plugins on your WordPress site, you can use the following command:

     wp plugin list

Uninstall Plugins

To uninstall a WordPress plugin:

  1. Navigate to your WordPress site’s root directory. Replace example.com with your own site’s root directory.

     cd /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. Deactivate and uninstall the plugin:

     wp plugin deactivate wordpress-seo
 wp plugin uninstall wordpress-seo

Install Themes

The procedure for installing and activating a theme is nearly identical to that of a plugin. Just swap plugin for theme in all of the commands.

  1. Navigate to your WordPress site’s root directory. Replace example.com with your own site’s root directory.

     cd /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. Search for the theme you’d like to install. Replace twentyfourteen with the theme you’d like to install.

     wp theme search twentyfourteen

  3. Install and activate the theme:

     wp theme install twentyfourteen
 wp theme activate twentyfourteen

Update Themes

  1. Navigate to your WordPress site’s root directory. Replace example.com with your own site’s root directory.

     cd /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. To list all the themes in a tabular form issue the example command. You can use this command to find the theme you would like to update.

     wp theme list

  3. Update your theme:

     wp theme update twentyfourteen

    To update all themes installed on your WordPress site, issue the following command:

     wp theme update --all

Uninstall Themes

  1. Navigate to your WordPress site’s root directory. Replace example.com with your own site’s root directory.

     cd /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. To uninstall a theme, activate a different theme first:

     wp theme activate twentyseventeen

  3. Once you’ve activated another theme, you can safely uninstall the previously active theme:

     wp theme uninstall twentynineteen

Update WordPress

To update your WordPress site:

Note
For more details on best practices when updating your WordPress site, see WordPress’ official documentation.

  1. Navigate to your WordPress site’s root directory. Replace example.com with your own site’s root directory.

     cd /var/www/html/example.com/public_html

  2. Update all your site’s files first:

     wp core update

  3. Update your site’s database:

     wp core update-db

Next Steps

You can now further configure WP-CLI. These commands are just the tip of the iceberg about how you can manage WordPress from the command line. Write or edit posts, perform database queries, manage user capabilities, manage cron events, import or export content, manage attachments, and even manage multi-site installations through a few, quick and practical keystrokes. You have refined WordPress management, and conserved valuable time.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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